Introduction
Liesbeth Decan, Marie-Pascale Gildemyn and Hilde Van Gelder
This book is the first career-encompassing monographic study of Philippe Van Snick’s œuvre. It is the result of a very close and long-term collaboration between the artist and a team of researchers and designers. It has been created to serve as an instrument for discovering Van Snick’s body of work as a totality. The many red threads it reveals allow us to understand the work in its full coherence as a complete project. Van Snick’s artistic production is often known only in a fragmentary way. The larger public still mostly sees him as an abstract painter. This publication reveals he has been experimenting with a wide variety of materials and techniques, such as drawings and works on paper, photography, film, sculptures and works in situ. This extremely rich range of artistic experiments is characterized by a remarkable internal logic and sharpness of vision. This vision is typified by the artist’s consistent interest in the principle of duality as a fundamental driving force in his work and life. Both the figurative and the abstract works are at all times closely tied to everyday reality, life and nature. In this way, Van Snick is able to visually gather and often even reconcile individual and universal forces. The accumulation of time incorporated in his work as a whole has generated a very specific, highly moving visual idiom and as a consequence it is now possible to distinguish Van Snick from his generation of peers, the conceptual artists of the early 1970s. The methodology followed in this book is one of archiving and enlisting data, bringing them in relation to a generous selection of images. This allows for discovering and linking elements from the reality within which the oeuvre developed over the past five decennia. The timeline starts in the mid-1960s and ends today. It offers an overview of the most relevant data that enable an understanding of the genesis and evolution of the work and the context in which it came into being. With meticulous precision and patience, all information has been transcribed from the original sources (letters, invitation cards, books, catalogues, etc.), reflecting the spirit of the epoch by retaining the terminology of the time (such as the use of ‘commissioner/curator’) and often resulting in different spelling of names. Crucial to this titanic task was the conscious choice to execute this work now, sitting together in Van Snick’s Brussels studio while going through the vast amount of available archive materials in order to create a document that holds art historical value and testifies scientifically to what has happened within his fascinating artistic universe from the late 1960s until the present, departing from the very early, formative years. It has never been the intention of the participants of this study to compose a catalogue raisonné. Nevertheless, this book intends to offer an insightful overview of all the themes and aspects that have been important
9